The UN/WHO recommendation is based entirely on the threat of breast cancer from acrylamide in food (the very thing the JAMA study recently rebutted). Their “Expert Committee” notes that the lowest daily acrylamide dose likely to cause “mammary tumors” is 300 micrograms per day for every kilogram of body weight. Do the math, and you find that for a 132-pound woman (about 60 kilograms) to have a higher breast-cancer risk from the acrylamide in her food, she would have to indulge in more than 460 Wendy’s “biggie” French-fry orders or 128 boxes of Cheerios every day for the rest of her life. And that’s according to CSPI’s own numbers. The group has claimed that cancer from food-borne acrylamide kills as many as 8,900 of us every year, but has yet to produce an American capable of downing 54,000 taco shells.

The UN and WHO “experts,” imagining a worst-case scenario, concede that the exposure of the “highest consumers” of acrylamide-rich foods — which, by the way, include spinach, beets, asparagus, and tomato sauce — only reaches one-seventy-fifth (1.3 percent) of the level needed to add any breast-cancer risk (see pp. 16-17). Yet they still call this safety margin “too low.”